The Last Screening

Mild-mannered Sylvain (Pascal Cervo) is the manager and projectionist of a small-town cinema that’s facing its final days – although Sylvain carries on as normal, greeting his regulars as they come to watch Renoir’s French Cancan. After hours, however, Sylvain reveals his other self – a dangerous marauder with a grisly fetish. Starting out resembling a French Cinema Paradiso as Truffaut might have made it, Last Screening soon veers into darker territory, suggesting a spare, poised take on Brian de Palma material (with a streak of black mischief that Claude Chabrol would surely have approved of). In part a lament for the twilight of celluloid culture, this distinctive, quietly unsettling film by Laurent Achard (Demented, LFF 2006) nevertheless reminds us that a cinephile upbringing doesn’t necessarily make for a well-balanced citizen. The unnervingly presentable Sylvain is a dutiful son gone bad, cut from the same cloth as Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom (a key reference, for sure) and, of course, Norman Bates. Crisp, concise and stylishly nasty, Last Screening marks Achard as a director of consummate skill and dark wit. –BFI